One thing you have to give Tim Pawlenty: The man knows when to cut and run.

First, he gets scared out of the presidential contest by Michele Bachmann's ability to put old white people on a bus and move them from one place in Iowa to another. And then, as the chairman of the Willard Romney campaign, T-Paw looks around the quarterdeck and sees everyone dying of scurvy, and the water coming over the gunwales, and he grabs the first lifeboat and rows away as fast as he can.

I disagree with David Kurtz a little here. I think this has very much to do with T-Paw's desire to distance himself from the plague ship before it goes under, although I do agree that it's a quintessential Beltway revolving-door bag job. The man still has national ambitions, I reckon, and the Financial Services Roundtable strikes me as a nice place to network yourself into another run, and to guarantee yourself sufficient funds in the future to bus enough oldsters to the state fair to make yourself "viable" again. Of course, all of this would go for naught if you're seen as having been the sailing master on the HMS I'm With Stupid.